Having to work on two apps at once was for sure a challenge. In the first week of the project, I needed to develop full Alpha builds of two games, now THAT was a challenge! I would say that it was more like 2.5 games I made, as for Splop, I also created a level builder tool to create levels, save them out to CSV and load the CSVs into the game to play. I did an average of 16 hours a day for 4 days straight on these games and the level builder, it was one of the most intense weekends I have ever had.

Positives of teamwork in projects

For Splop, I totally had the wrong idea what role you played in the game, initially I thought that you were a separate entity jumping over jellies. Thinking this would have totally changed the game mechanic, and a lot of code would have had to be changed if it wasn’t for myself showing Gareth my progress after I finished the level builder for Splop, before I started on the development of the game. Gareth quickly picked up on my explanation and display of a player entity being placed in the level builder to be saved out in the created level.

Team members were generally productive and especially in the second half of the project development, they would ask me if I needed any help or less of a workload as they knew how busy I was having to handle two projects. All four of my designers were super understanding and lenient towards my milestone deadline progressions. I would always get stuff done by the deadlines, it would just be slightly less than expected, probably 80-90% of what I would promise would be done.

I thank all four of my designers personally for how great they acted towards me during the progression of their app developments, they were forceful, but a good kind of forceful, not too much, just to the extent they knew I could do stuff to, if they were more forceful towards what needed to be done by deadlines, I don’t think I could have coped with the workload, it would have just been too insane making two Alphas to their full potential in one 4-day period if I was limited to that.

Negatives of teamwork in projects

Very hard to contact group members on-the-fly. I think it is a problem with both Slack and Discord apps on phones, as people found it hard to contact me as well at times, I don’t get notified of any messages coming in from both of those apps, unless i am explicitly tagged in a comment, even then that only notifies me 80% of the time.

Mostly near the start, GDDs did not have all the information I needed and this ties into the previous point where it was hard to contact members, forcing me to decide for myself what was needed to fill in the missing information, luckily I set it up where values could be changed easily because I got a couple of things totally wrong and only needed to change a formula and some values that were also made available to the Designers.

Since my time was split between two apps, I did not get to put my full potential into both apps, like I stated earlier, I had completed 80-90% of what I wanted to do to both apps, but that last 10-20% really counts as well.